well on to our bit of washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture in tonight's conversations with great minds half hour i'm joined by robert alvarez seasoned nuclear energy specialist with scott's everything from the daiichi disaster how to reform the u.s. energy plus the republican party continues their war on the middle class their strategy of raising taxes and cutting benefits of working people one of the issues we'll tackle in our weekly. and our bank of america and getting away without pain

of any in taxes while we the people have to shell out a little more i'll explain it's not strategic. for their eyes conversations with great minds i'm joined by robert alvarez senior scholar at the institute for policy studies for five years mr alvarez served as one of the summits primary step experts on nuclear weapons and helped establish the environmental cleanup program for the department of energy he also led teams to north korea to establish control of nuclear weapons materials in that country in light of the largest radiation detection at the ichi plant japan is dealing with what may well turn out to be one of the worst nuclear crises on record to share his expertise on that and that whole spectrum of situations mr alvarez joins me here in the studio robert alvarez welcome to the program thank you for having me on your

show thanks for joining us you know people who have done things as consequential as you have in your life were really just popped out of nowhere i'm curious how did you get on this career path what brought you through to this one. well i mean you weren't bacteria facts were were cracked words. before i. joined in some for policy studies about eight years ago i was a senior policy adviser to the secretary of energy and i did that or six years and while at the energy department as you noted i you know did a lot of did several things to including. going to north korea and trying to secure the spent fuel there. was also involved in and strategic management of nuclear materials for the department. worker compensation for workers put in harm's way who made nuclear weapons those kinds of things and then for five

years before that i did more or less full time oversight and investigations on the civilian and military nuclear programs. for the senate committee on government affairs which was then chaired by senator john glenn and he was quite interested in in this and was also a senior member of the senate armed services committee so i had to do sort of dual duty before that i worked for thirteen years. for a national environmental advocacy group and that has since. gone away i guess called the environmental policy institute worked in. before that and three level jobs in congress and you know certain went to college and got my college degrees and did very good in science and math and so and i've been involved in nuclear both civilian and military nuclear policy issues for about thirty six

years so. that's that's substantial and back on july sixteenth one thousand and seventy nine president of president carter spoke to the nation and announced a new energy policy for the united states let's look just take a listen here. so the energy crisis is real. it is a president danger to our nation these are back and we simply must face the what i have to say to you now but energy and vitally important point. i am tonight sending a clear well the image of policy of the united states beginning this week this nation will never use. than we did in hundred seventy seven and. i will soon submit the disclosure to congress calling for the creation of this nation's first solo bank which will help us achieve the crucial twenty percent of

our going to come in from solar power by the year two thousand. by the year two thousand twenty percent solar when when my wife and i were moving to vermont a decade or so ago we were looking at all these houses out there country first time we really did and we kept coming across these solar off the grid houses every single one of them was built in seventy nine or eighty or really needing one right you know because carter had given those energy tax credits and construction credits reagan took the whole program apart he took down the solar plexus of the top rooftop of the white house what happened to our energy policy then and where are we now with regard to national energy well i think the the u.s. government as a player in energy policy. was pretty much sidelined and that the major policy decisions affecting how much energy we use were comes from what its impacts are have been made by the marketplace and the marketplace is dominated.

by large fossil fuel companies principally all companies so what's happening and this is this sort of policy is perpetuated. i must admit. through the clinton administration that it is you know it is really had. made the situation much more serious and much more difficult and problematic i mean there are you know there are reasons why we have a huge military presence in the middle east why we are now in the midst of three conflicts and it has to do with the large amount of oil which we are dependent on and we we are we are about five point five percent of the world's population but we consume the most oil workers you know about it well that's correct about twenty five percent of our oil. is consumed by the american public and.

a very large fraction of that i would say summer at least sixty percent comes from foreign sources so the situation is actually gotten worse when carter in seventy nine made that speech my recollection is the seventy four seventy five is generally estimated as the peak oil point for the united states that's right and during that decade we made the transition from being a net x. oil exporter we were actually exploiting oil that's right there in the during the. nixon and ford motor of thirty forty years and we had just started importing oil seriously i mean there was that oil shock in seventy two or seventy three you know that. looks up to it but we were and then we became that oil importer so what carter said we're never going to import more oil and we didn't seventy seven that must have been what ten percent of our oil maybe yeah and i think that proof that proved his his prediction prove how worthy ocular strong right it's like if you

wonder how you know if you explained how we got here what speaking of energy it will watching this ongoing disaster in japan. any thoughts on the current status. of the day when i think it's important understand a. person like me i am operating on fragmentary information and it's hard to piece together all the details and it's not clear that all the details are being made public. by the japanese government and japanese utility or the u.s. american authorities involved and japan and helping out what i can sort of i guess conclude on the basis of that limited information is that they've made some progress you know they've been reestablished on site power which is extremely important but they're not out of the woods and that they're there has there

was a lot of damage to the necessary infrastructure equipment necessary to. stabilize the situation and that really involves providing coolant for the reactor and the spent fuel pools and that's still not. there still not the area well it would seem like salt water is pretty corrosive stall those are. most of all water i think was not on the talk was to their menu of options and i think that was close to what you call hell mary option mr de rogatis you let out of desperation because all other else other sources of water to cool off the these runaway reactions were not available to them at. the thought struck me today as i was watching a news report. there expanding the accusations of wealthy involuntary and the voluntary evacuations and i was and i used to live here for right. next door

but within fifty miles or and and i was thinking you know where these people going to go we're talking about a million people in a country that is a fragment of the size of the united states or thirty. oh and you know as you know it's even worse because of the it's destruction and i have a reach by the earthquakes and tsunamis i mean it's a very tragic and difficult situation and i certainly. have great sympathy for the survivors and the emergency responders and everybody is trying to pitch in to. keep people out of harm's way right now and try to restore. some modicum of life support through the population. or person thoughts go with them back in two thousand and two you were writing i read a policy piece that you wrote about the dangers of spent fuel i called nuclear

waste spent fuel in pools that were basically open to the not the story over the air but not protected by giant concrete columns and things like this turns out one of the things that we learned from president bush's interrogation programs when he got ahold of muhammad was that muhammad. originally had planned not to hit the world trade center with those two planes but to hit the indian point nuclear power plant and he abandoned that plan relatively late on the assumption that a there must be surface to air missiles protection which there weren't then and there aren't now and b. that the reactor casing would be so hard to fit even to planes might not go through it just being made out of aluminum. but what would happen if not even hit hit the reactor but what if you just hit the spent fuel pool well that was a concern that we give me

a rose in my mind in the mind of several of my colleagues right after the nine eleven attacks because these pools are not under the thick containment. there are thirty four reactors that have elevated pools seventy to eighty feet about. or vermont yankee for example and daiichi and that. for example the vermont yankee plant which has an elevated pool has roughly five times the amount of spent fuel in all of the individual reactors. so if they hit the waste fuel the nuclear waste pool is spent fuel pool. there would be not necessarily atomic i don't even think an atomic bomb but there would be an explosion that would it would be old and her dirty bomb would well what what we what we wrote this paper in january two thousand and two and inspired several of my colleagues and i to do a much more in-depth look at this and we published

a paper in january two thousand and three and what what we pointed out was that if something an earthquake or somebody or some people could cause the water to drain in these pools that the the zirconium cladding the metal that surrounds the irradiated uranium which contains a great deal of radioactivity could result in a catastrophic fire releasing very large amounts of long live radiation and we we calculated that the radiation release would create a an area that's uninhabitable substantially larger than that created by the turn over the last that well and what what why the spent fuel pools are of concern if i may interrupt is that it was cherno that was just the reactor going and not all of the waste of the snow that we have but the reactor itself had experienced

a huge explosion and a fire that went on for roughly a week and it did cause that a large amount of radioactive material and the bad actor in this is cesium one thirty seven it has a half life of thirty years and if it's deposited in large substantial amounts nearby and you're standing near it it gives off penetrating radiation x. rays gamma rays is what it gives often and starts to radiate your whole body then once it's in the it's on the ground it starts to absorb in the environment as if it were potassium. and as it. as it stays the environment the plants the animals the foodstuffs concentrate the this radioactive material in the environment we have potassium in almost every part of our body that's right that's right every muscle tissue requires potassium so what resulted is that because of the cesium

one thirty seven releases around turned over the area that's considered uninhabitable for an indefinite period the rule of thumb is that cesium one thirty seven has to have five or thirty years it takes roughly ten years ten half lives rather for it to decay down to levels presumed to be safe three hundred years roughly hundreds of years yes certainly that an area roughly the size of half of the state of new jersey was rendered uninhabitable i sure hope by turn noble and what we estimated is that if they all firewood or her. were partially or fully drained that it could release many times more a radio cesium radioactive cesium then turn noble and result in land contamination that could be four times greater five times greater so so these concerns of india are well founded we're going to take

a break here welcome back i'm curious as economists well after the break part two of our conversations with great minds the nuclear specialist robert l. . let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here in the. if you. want to. we haven't got so if we are safe ready for freedom.

in the world. you know sometimes you see the story and the scene so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you see some other part of it and realized everything you saw. i'm sorry is a big issue. welcome

back to conversations with great minds i'm joined by robert alvarez senior scholar at the institute of policy studies robert is an expert on nuclear energy policy having written for several publications such as science magazine technology review the washington post thanks for being with us robert thank. you so you made a point earlier that provoked a question in my mind you said these are podium rods into which the nuclear fuel was inserted both for the reactor and then later and it's up there in the in the waste ones or the spent fuel ponds could ignite create a fire that would blow the contents of the contain up into the year the ultimately the cesium the most dangerous thing or the the most the largest quantity. zirconium

if my memory serves me right ignites around twenty one hundred degrees fahrenheit well what goes on it gets in these pools i mean there was a pool explosion. at the pool in the fukushima daichi unit number four and what happens is that when the fuel is exposed and he. it starts to go it's the thermocline other words it's starts it's a very reactive metal and it starts to interact with the water and it oxidizes sort of rust or county and yes and what it does is it peels off the hydrogen from the molecules of the water and rapid oxidation is what's called an iron and fire exactly right and then is they're going to make nice somewhere around eight thousand two thousand degrees centigrade trying to convert this into fahrenheit but over on that those temperatures and then it's sort of being fed by this hydrogen

right so that's sort of what happened the question that which which i think would be in the neighborhood of two thousand years fahrenheit when there were some yeah i recall very recently. wiser connie and i mean that's like magnesium you know well it's a very reactive metal as long as it doesn't get heated up and but it's very durable in terms of preventing the radioactive contents of the material that that are created in a reactor from a scaping ice and so it has these kind of dual properties is that it's fairly good when you have it in a reactor as long as that doesn't overheat and then it becomes very reactive right but as bit as soon as you lose the water from the spent fuel pool or a reactor vessel or reactor of us or you're guaranteed it's going to start overheating is going to ultimately catch on fire and then i will not have this

large generation of hydrogen. that once it starts to mix with washington somewhere and there is any any possibility of a spark it will go this is this why the nuclear power industry is on insurable why we have to ensure through tax payers your price anderson is it that well you know flaws of the design i think that it's been a long standing under a law a long historical understanding about nuclear power is that in order for nuclear power to be promotional eyes in the united states it became impossible unless the government put a limit on liability for catastrophic accident so if you look in your home insurance policy you'll find that you're not covered for a new verb have gone for nuclear actually going up and they put a cap on it so that if the amount of damage and harm exceeds

a certain little but i believe it's at this time approximately twelve billion dollars then the taxpayer has to come in and pay for the rest of it so that in those price answers that's right that's right senator snowe which enabled us why is is wall street you wrote about this recently that wall street was unwilling to fund any nuclear power plants and therefore they're having to come to the government to borrow money going to wall street stop lending money for nuclear power plants. before the three mile island accident around one thousand nine hundred sixty nine hundred seventy seven and the reason that they stopped doing it was because. the costs of these plants kept soaring many plants were canceled and they and investors lost huge amounts of money there was then a three mile island accident sort of really drove it home because while the accident itself didn't result in a catastrophic release and the containment worked. the

a multi-billion dollar investment was lost in less than an hour that's that's there and you can see in at this time wall street still won't touch these reactors with a ten foot pole and so you'd think that the advocates of the free market. would not be the advocates of nuclear power although they seem to be this is all i think it's a be ok to cry for is a big contradiction because those who do advocate you know less and less role of the government here are insisting on unfettered access to the u.s. treasury for nuclear power. yeah i mean you suggested that the the energy department should be reorganized i think most americans don't understand that the energy department is there is also the department where you work that makes bombs that's right if you take a look at the energy department's budget request. for many years it's not unique to the obama administration but for many years. what you'll find is that actual

energy activities that is to say. the department helps manage power marketa you ministrations public administration in the western states and it has a strategic petroleum reserve the energy information administration and the single largest aspect of its energy related programs is research and development spending those programs all together make up less than twenty percent. of the energy department's budget sixty percent and sometimes up to two thirds of the budget. are spent. essentially maintaining thousands of nuclear weapons a large fraction of which have already been discarded by the military but we haven't gotten around to taking them sharky handed over to g.o.g. the department well i have advocated that yes and there's there are historic reasons why this came about is that the energy department was created largely by

merging it with the atomic energy commission and there was a big debate shortly after world war two about whether the military should should have absolute control over. the atom so to speak and there was a sentiment that was supported that led to what we believed to be civilian control but in looking back the military got everything it wanted and then right so and they got rid of this liability yeah i look at it pace and i kind of look at what the end of the nuclear weapons enterprise of the department of energy is like a millstone and if the department can jettison that and put it where it belongs in the defense department and let them sort of have to come to terms with their rather large expenses of maintaining thousands of nuclear weapons. we have a chance of restructuring the department of energy so it can actually make

a meaningful difference in our energy policy so we all share in a new a new and better energy future for america if they would actually become an energy for it and to that point. this year the oil industry which in the united states is actually mostly foreign oil and b.p. and shell absolutely the oil industry is going to get three billion dollars gift from the taxpayers and. how much it's going to renewables. well right now if you look at the energy. the portfolio of the apartment of energy. it's about. five point seven billion something like that. one third the single largest amount is going for nuclear energy and that is because that money goes to department of energy nuclear sites it doesn't go to the nuclear power plants. say

second biggest is going to conservation which is a real i think bright spot in the picture and then the third larger amounts going for fossil fuels and then all the other renewables then more benign energy get the rest so that so with three billion is going to just oil as part of fossil fuels the wind solar everything else must be right i mean whatever way it happens is that when you start to who are more money into things like fossil fuels and nuclear it has the effect of taking the oxygen out of the room for everybody else this i'm i'm assuming that you think that the policy should be. yes i think so i mean i think that that we should you know we have a we have a large antiquated nuclear infrastructure that's owned by the federal government that is largely unneeded at this point and it's going to take a considerable expense to clean it up i'm not trivializing the importance of

dealing with the mess because we have sites out there like him have had washington which are i have heard is considered the most contaminated sort of western hemisphere you wrote about how the native americans in that area were for that kind of cancer well and they're put in a extraordinarily high risk so we need to do that cleanup but at the same time we shouldn't have this tail wagging our energy policy dog it's that simple. can we ever develop a permanent safe way to deal with all the nuclear waste that we generated from our weapons and our energy policies i think we can i think that that geologic disposal can work. i don't think you come out was ever going to work because in truth it was a decision made by congress and not by scientists and it was made because of. the pressure from other states that it wanted in their backyards on the eve of the

eighty eight elections and i thought time there but i had one electoral vote and a fairly and not so strong congressional delegation and that's changed now so they were the docket they got to tell but i think that we really i think geologic disposal is a viable way to go we need to take our time to do it right we need to do it in a way where we can. gain public trust in our efforts so that we are not trying to rush things and do things because. in new york and we owned it we cracked it up it's out west who cares you know that kind of logic and but it's very important that we do this in the meantime i think that with respect to nuclear power in particular which has generated the largest concentrations of radioactivity on.